Theatre

Great Britain and Ireland

In spite of the economic recession, which started to bite hard into the pockets and lives of most British citizens in 2009, figures from the Society of London Theatre showed that total attendances in the West End had risen by 2.5%. Box office receipts increased by 3.5% compared with 2008.

Money itself, and the collapse of the world markets, became the hot theatre topic of the year in plays by 10 new writers at the small Soho Theatre under the group title Everything Must Go. Second-time playwright Lucy Prebble and director Rupert Goold offered Enron, an epic satiric drama of that company’s demise, produced by Goold’s touring company, Headlong, at the Chichester Festival Theatre and the Royal Court Theatre. Enron aroused comparisons with Caryl Churchill’s Serious Money, a zippy 1987 satire on the Big Bang (the radical deregulation of the London Stock Exchange in 1986), but the play seemed even more timely in its skillful anatomization of the financial shenanigans in the fantasy world of projected profits and phantom companies, with Samuel West’s outstanding portrayal of Enron’s disgraced president, Jeffrey Skilling, assuming the tragic heft of a Shakespearean hero.

The financial crisis was explored more broadly in David Hare’s The Power of Yes at the National Theatre (NT) in an attempt, said the playwright, to break through the protective attitude of the bankers. Hare spent an intense period of research on his play, and it attracted enormous interest, not least for his view that in rescuing the banks the British government was replacing capitalism with a socialism that bailed out the rich alone.

The theatre seemed to be catching the mood of the country all year as big, important plays appeared in rapid succession across the London stages. The comparatively unknown playwright Steve Waters produced a stunning doubleheader on climate change, The Contingency Plan, at the little Bush Theatre; the two plays—Resilience and On the Beach—painted an apocalyptic scenario of Britain disappearing beneath rising sea levels while politicians wrangled over minor details following a Conservative Party election victory in 2010. Jez Butterworth returned to the theatre after a long absence with two new plays—Parlour Song and Jerusalem. They were both directed by Ian Rickson and suggested that nature would take revenge on suburban town dwellers and that the process of disintegration had already begun. Butterworth’s Parlour Song at the Almeida Theatre (first seen in New York City in 2008) proved to be, however, a mere curtain-raiser (with very funny scenes) to his magnum opus Jerusalem at the Royal Court. This was a dystopian hymn to hippie values down in the forest on St. George’s Day, with Johnny Byron—the Pied Piper of the drunk, disenfranchised, and disaffected—leading the dance against the incursions of the authorities who wanted to wipe out his mobile home. Byron, as played by Mark Rylance in a performance of Falstaffian swagger and humanity, was a modern Lord of Misrule summoning the mysteries of Stonehenge and the legends of old Albion. The play was destined for a West End transfer after Rylance—having garnered uniformly rave reviews and selling out at the box office—completed an engagement in Simon McBurney’s revival of Samuel Beckett’s Endgame in late 2009.

The other big play of the year was Simon Stephens’s Punk Rock at the Lyric Hammersmith, a scintillating comedy of high-school classroom anxieties and friendship culminating in a terrible tragedy in the school library. The echoes of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre (Littleton, Colo.) were the least of the play’s strengths, which also covered ground similar to Spring Awakening and many British plays such as Julian Mitchell’s Another Country and Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. Nevertheless, Stephens was a unique and increasingly powerful voice on the British stage, and the vigour and perceptiveness of his dialogue as well as the brilliance of the acting in a cast of mostly unknowns—Tom Sturridge (a new Ben Whishaw, possibly), Jessica Raine, Henry Lloyd-Hughes, and Nicholas Banks were all outstanding—ensured against cliché and banality.

Punk Rock marked a new era at the Lyric, one of London’s leading outer-ring theatres, under the artistic directorship of Sean Holmes, who was making a point of building his policy around a youth theatre scheme, much as Dominic Cooke had channeled the Royal Court’s young writers onto the main stage. Polly Stenham followed her remarkable 2007 debut play, That Face, with Tusk Tusk, a similar almost-anthropological account of young teenagers left to fend for themselves in a middle-class limbo without adults; their mother had gone missing on a drink-and-drugs binge.

The Royal Court also celebrated its historic collaboration with New York City playwright Wallace Shawn in a season in which three of his plays were staged. The productions included two revivals, The Fever (in which the self-lacerating monologist was played by Clare Higgins) and Aunt Dan and Lemon, and the world premiere of Grasses of a Thousand Colours, in which Shawn, directed by his old friend and colleague André Gregory and abetted by Miranda Richardson as his feline wife and Jennifer Tilly as his lubricious mistress, played a self-satisfied scientist who rhapsodizes on his sexual obsessions in a fantastical memoir.

Grasses was a genuinely controversial play, but it struck a firm chord in a year that also saw several fine West End revivals. Bennett’s one-time flop Enjoy, was restored, in performances by Alison Steadman and David Troughton, as a plangent and bitter comedy of old age with more than a touch of both Joe Orton and Beckett. Other notable revivals were Alan Ayckbourn’s remarkable Woman in Mind, with Janie Dee fantasizing an alternative life in her own back garden; Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, an almost indecently enjoyable comedy of conflicting time periods, biography, mathematics, and gardening in a 19th-century country house; Richard Greenberg’s Three Days of Rain, starring James McAvoy; and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, with Ken Stott easily the best British Eddie Carbone since Michael Gambon.

The Donmar Warehouse’s season in the West End at Wyndham’s Theatre wrapped with Dame Judi Dench leading an extravagantly costumed cast in Yukio Mishima’s tiresome Madame de Sade, which not even Michael Grandage’s classy but stilted direction could save from critical odium, and Grandage’s production of Jude Law’s Hamlet. It was Law’s performance, however, that flattered to deceive in its monotonous anger and conspicuous lack of wit; it was not apparent that Hamlet was actually a very funny character.

Back at base, the Donmar reeled off some more excellent revivals, just about deflecting suspicions that the house style (black brick wall, flagstones, dry ice, great sound tracks, quick acting) was wearing thin. Jonathan Pryce breathed fresh life into Athol Fugard’s Dimetos, while Gillian Anderson and Toby Stephens played a compelling duet in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (updated to resonate with more financial scandal). Rachel Weisz scored a personal success as Blanche DuBois in an overrated A Streetcar Named Desire (directed by choreographer Rob Ashford), and Dominic West returned from television (The Wire) to lead a new look at Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s classic Life Is a Dream.

The West End smash hits, apart from Law’s Hamlet, were Sir Ian McKellen and soon-to-be-Sir Patrick Stewart as the tramps in Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, both in top form and very funny, and a bevy of discreetly naked respectable actresses, including Sian Phillips and Patricia Hodge, in the stage version of the sentimental film Calendar Girls. More film titles boosting the box office included The Shawshank Redemption and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the latter starring Anna Friel, with both adaptations claiming to bypass the movies and reanimate the darker heart of the original novellas by Stephen King and Truman Capote, respectively.

Two big new splashy musicals claimed a similar, somewhat snobby, ascendancy over their celluloid templates, but both Priscilla, Queen of the Desert at the Palace Theatre and Sister Act at the London Palladium were handicapped by routine pop scores—the first rehashing old hits like a karaoke night with costumes to die for, the second moving on Motown with mixed results. Patina Miller in the Whoopi Goldberg “nun on the run” role made a truly sensational debut, however.

The flagging box office for Thriller Live, a Michael Jackson tribute show, was transformed on the night of his death—the doorway of the Lyric Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue became a floral shrine—though Too Close to the Sun, a musical about the suicide of Ernest Hemingway, really did disappear without a trace, helped along by critical suggestions along the lines that the show should be rechristened “Ernie Get Your Gun.”

At the NT the temperature rose with two scorching presentations: Peter Flannery’s skillful stage version of the Russian movie Burnt by the Sun, which featured knockout performances by Ciaran Hinds, Michelle Dockery, and Rory Kinnear and direction by Howard Davies; and Helen Mirren as the tragically smitten queen in Jean Racine’s Phèdre. The latter, which used the old Ted Hughes translation, was directed by Nicholas Hytner and set the action on a sunbaked Mediterranean design by Bob Crowley. At year’s end, Hytner (with Stewart) was awarded a knighthood in the New Year’s honours list.

Phèdre was the first NT production to be screened live, as performed onstage, in Britain and abroad; it was the latest move by Hytner, the NT’s artistic director, to sustain as wide a public interest as possible in the work. His own production of Richard Bean’s England People Very Nice was a cartoon résumé of immigration to Britain, flaring in a public row over the Muslim section when antiracism campaigners led the first onstage demonstration of the NT’s history, which disrupted a preperformance discussion. The theatre stood firm in its commitment to the play, and the furor soon abated. Bennett’s latest play, also directed by Hytner, The Habit of Art, centred on a fictional meeting between the poet W.H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten (portrayed, respectively, by Richard Griffiths and Alex Jennings) and played entertainingly with more high-brow, less controversial concerns.

The rare sightings of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) in London—one presumes the tourists are as mystified as the residents—were eclipsed anyway by Marianne Elliott’s fairy-tale production of All’s Well That Ends Well at the National and the consistent standards at Shakespeare’s Globe, where Naomi Frederick was a truly delightful Rosalind in As You Like It. In the temporary Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the RSC offered tepid revivals of As You Like It and The Winter’s Tale but a more interesting Julius Caesar, with a “virtual” crowd on film that railed against the conspirators in the Forum and then took a bow—and waved to the audience. Director Lucy Bailey and designer William Dudley thus scored a first. Greg Hicks was superb as both Leontes and Caesar.

The Chichester Festival Theatre offered Joseph Fiennes in Cyrano de Bergerac, directed by Trevor Nunn, and Diana Rigg as Judith Bliss in a poor revival of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever. Nunn popped up again at the Old Vic to direct Kevin Spacey and David Troughton in a barnstorming revival of the old Broadway Darwinian warhorse Inherit the Wind. Spacey’s Old Vic also celebrated the 80th birthday of Ireland’s greatest living dramatist, Brian Friel, with a gorgeous in-the-round production of Dancing at Lughnasa, and Friel was further represented at the Edinburgh International Festival in a trilogy of plays from the Gate Theatre in Dublin.

Other Irish playwrights with new work at the Dublin Theatre Festival included Sebastian Barry, Enda Walsh, and Conor McPherson, who continued the screen-to-stage craze with The Birds. Though McPherson returned to Daphne du Maurier’s short story, the publicity material included a reference to the 1963 Alfred Hitchcock movie, a ploy to boost ticket sales.

Another highlight of the Edinburgh Festival was an orgiastic version of Goethe’s Faust by Romanian director Silviu Purcarete in a huge out-of-town warehouse arena, while Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre participated with Rona Munro’s The Last Witch, based on accounts of the last woman to be burned for witchcraft in Scotland, in 1727. The Traverse also ran a full program of new work on the fringe at their buzzing home base next to the Usher Hall, notably Midsummer (A Play with Songs) by David Greig and Gordon McIntyre; the searing Orphans, yet another look at the dysfunctional-family front line, by the talented Dennis Kelly; and the enchanting reminiscences of a politicized drag queen, A Life in Three Acts. The latter, which perhaps owed something to Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy, was written and performed by Bette Bourne and Mark Ravenhill.

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